Kevin's Weblog

2008-07-26

I couldn’t take detailed notes this year on account of a sprained
wrist, but here’s the highlights of my week.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday working on my talk. Tuesday
afternoon, I bounced back and forth between People
for Geeks and Francesco’s
Erlang Tutorial. Nothing new for me in the Erlang talk, but I
wanted to get an idea of what he was covering. There was a lot
packed into 3 hours, but people I talked to said positive things —
that they learned a lot about the language. Over in “People for
Geeks”, Andy Lester had quite a bit to say about working with your
manager which I considered questionable. For example, “don’t go to
your manager with problems” (I thought a manager’s job was to clear
obstacles) and “your job is to make your manager look good” (I
wonder what our shareholders and upper management have to say about
that one). On the other hand, pointing out that your manager is
probably not actually incompetent or malicious is valid, although
it’s a little sad that we have to point that out.

Tuesday evening was the opening extravaganza. I was kinda bored by
Mark Shuttleworth’s talk, but r0ml and Damian Conway were excellent as
usual. Although, knowing enough physics to be bothered by the
inaccuracies in Conway’s talk was a little annoying.

Wednesday I skipped the keynotes in favor of a proper breakfast and
another practice run before giving my
talk. Seemed to go well — good attendance, questions that
indicated people were interested in the subject matter. Bummer that
they scheduled both Erlang-related talks at the same time, though. A
talk about Hypertable
was interesting, although a few too many questions were answered by
“we’re still working on that”. Wrapped up the day with Paul
Fenwick’s An
Illustrated History of Failure, a fun overview of some of the
more spectacular (mostly software) failures the world has seen. In
the evening, went by the MySQL / Zend / Sun party, but spent most of
the time worrying that drunk people on tricycles were going to run
into me and complicate my injuries. Also, giant
rabbits are creepy.

Thursday. Nat’s keynote on teaching kids to program was
inspirational. I downloaded the programs he recommended to try out
with my daughter. Processing
Large Data with Hadoop and EC2 was quite interesting. The New
York Times used Hadoop and EC2 to do a pile of image processing
related to releasing the archives of the first 100 or so years of
the paper onto the web. Tim Bunce talked about Ultimate
Perl Code Profiling using Devel::NYTProf v2. To quote an
audience member, “I have only one question: why are you so
awesome?”. I also went to a talk about Meebo’s
Interview Process which was pretty interesting. I’m not sure
that I picked up anything new, but it did validate a number of
opinions I’ve formed about what works and what doesn’t over the
years. In particular, having candidates spend a couple hours
actually doing the sort of work they will on the job is a really
valuable technique. She’s stressed that you have to ask people to
do a task that people who don’t do that job would actually fail.
I’d add that your interview process should probably be rigorous
enough that some of your current employees who are doing that job
would fail it.

Thursday evening I decided to go home for a proper dinner, then
came back for Beerforge (kinda disappointingly sparsely attended)
and the O’Reilly speakers’ party (full of interesting people,
unsurprisingly).

On Friday, Tim Bray’s keynote was an amusingly frantic discussion
of language trends, with a nice shout-out given to Erlang, and a
general leaning towards functional languages as a promising
developing direction. The
Twilight Perl was a little less scary than average Conway,
because he limited himself to no source filters or even outside
modules for the most part. As a result, most of the tricks weren’t
too difficult to figure out if you’re familiar with all the corners
of the base language. But, it was still quite entertaining. After
his talk, I bailed on the closing keynotes (a repeat of “An
Illustrated History of Failure” for some reason) in favor of lunch
and trying to replace my missing phone (lost somewhere Weds
evening).

Two fan-boy moments: Spent a few minutes talking with Larry Wall
about Erlang, and asked Tim Bray for advice about hats (specifically
traveling with them).

Overall, it was a good week as usual. Once again, I was struck by
how much I felt that living in town actually detracted from the
conference experience. If I submit a talk for next year, I’ll make
sure to actually start writing it more than a week in advance; that
was stress I didn’t need.

Comments

I'm pretty sure that what I said was "Don't bring your boss problems that you can handle yourself." I might not have, which yes, does sound strange.

As to "make your boss look good," that should exactly fit with what shareholders & upper management want. It's how you focus your vision on what's immediately above you. Your boss will, if he's not a moron, have that worked out in your assignments and goals.

I think the bullet point version was "Your boss doesn't want to hear about problems or issues", although I acknowledge that you did clarify that somewhat later.

As for making my boss look good, I'd argue that that's only an incidental consequence of doing my job. As a senior developer, I'm expected to take initiative and do things that need to be done, _even_ if my boss hasn't noticed that they need doing.

Another factor that probably adds to my skepticism of some of what you talked about is that most of my experience suggests that the majority of tech organizations are, in fact, quite dysfunctional about management. As a result, the advice to simply find a new job if your management is poor strikes me as less useful than one might hope.

His recommended technique for taking hats on airplanes is simply to wait until everyone else has put their bags in the overhead compartment, then get up and find a spot where it is unlikely to get squished. An imperfect technique, but there doesn't seem to be any better options. (Also, some hats handle abuse better than others, so prefer those when traveling.)